THE EDITOR
Religious professionals took the lead in crucifying Jesus of Nazareth; now they are conspiring to kill the Living God also.
Standing by, consenting, and in fact strongly advocating the death of God, are numerous theologians. In Christian schools they seek to rally a task force of confirmed God-slayers. The ranks include Altizer at Emory University (Methodist), Hamilton at Colgate Rochester Divinity School (Baptist), and in some respects Van Buren at Temple University (interdenominational).
A full public hearing of their views is encouraged by the ecumenical Sanhedrin. Their faith-and-order dialogue easily and swiftly seems to embrace almost every theological novelty. Meanwhile, it largely ignores traditional evangelical views or disdains them as heresy—the sole heresy-at that—even though biblical supernaturalism is not only the historic faith of Christianity but also the sincere faith of most churchgoers.
Conflict over the supernaturalism of the Bible is age-old. In the ancient world, both Judaism and Christianity contended constantly against polytheistic myths. In the Middle Ages, a mist of scholastic speculation and popular superstition often beclouded the Living God. Aided by this climate, modern philosophers swiftly recast the God of the Bible to suit their many rationalistic preferences. One anti-biblical theory quickly encouraged another, until Marx dramatically countered Hegel’s God is everything with the atheistic credo: God is nothing, and dialectical materialism everything.
Although anti-supernaturalism is not new, Christian leaders like Billy Graham, Charles Malik, and D. Elton Trueblood remind us that the tide of atheism is rising to unprecedented heights with alarming speed.
“Never in my life,” writes Trueblood, professor of philosophy at Earlham College, “have I known a time when the attacks on the Gospel were as vicious as they are now. I see about me a far more militant atheism than I have ever known, and I see it pressed with evangelistic fervor.”
Evangelist Billy Graham thinks the daring wickedness and unbelief of the modern world, when seen alongside divine judgment on earlier civilizations, may perhaps signal “God’s last great call” to a generation at the brink of destruction.
And the former chairman of the United Nations General Assembly, Charles Malik, notes that while organized society and governments in the Western world have taken no formal, official stand against religion and against Christ, “we see very virulent movements of secularism and atheism.”
This atheistic propaganda is spectacular not only for its scope and savagery but also for its entrenchment in Protestant institutions. A century ago when Ludwig Feuerbach lapsed to the view that a supernatural God is a product of human imagination and desire, his teaching career at Erlangen University, a center of Lutheran theology, ended abruptly. Feuerbach’s revolt against the inherited religion was extended by Lenin’s insistence that the capitalists advanced faith in God in order to comfort the (supposed) victims of their (supposed) exploitation—a theory that required the crudest of caricatures of the Founder of Christianity, the carpenter of Nazareth. But the revolt against Christianity carried Communists like Stalin, once a Greek Orthodox seminarian, outside the church in their defection to atheistic naturalism. Today, however, scholars disseminate their God-is-dead propaganda from Protestant institutions whose support comes from sacrificial, devout believers interested in promoting Christ’s Gospel. As Trueblood comments, “Some of the most damaging attacks on the validity of the Gospel are coming from those who claim some kind of marginal connection with Christianity.”
At the Montreal Faith and Order Conference of the World Council of Churches, a Russian Orthodox churchman told New Testament scholars of the Bultmann school (which contends that the miracles of the Bible are myths) that “in Russia we do not need theologians to tell us” that the gospel miracles are myths: this is part of the Communist creed.
Few people would deny another’s right to be an atheist (although the Roman Catholic Church only recently faced the issue of one’s right to be a Protestant). But for the sake of God and integrity let such propaganda be peddled not in Christian schools but in institutions dedicated to unbelief.
The current point of crisis in theism—namely, belief in a supernatural mind and will—is a by-product of the nineteenth-century modernist defection from the historic Christian faith. Radical German higher critics presumed to derive biblical religion from an evolutionary process that dispensed with supernatural being and revelation. Brilliant scholars like Cyrus H. Gordon and William F. Albright have long since exposed the indefensible rationalistic bias of these critics. Albright considers virtually all their arguments against early Israelite monotheism “as invalid and some of them as quite absurd” (History, Archaeology, and Christian Humanism, McGraw-Hill, 1964, p. 99). One God appears throughout all the history of Israel as an indictment against the multitude of deities cherished in the pagan world. The Canaanites named seventy, and the Babylonians alone listed thousands of divine names. But the Old Testament names one God alone who is in supreme control of reality, one God over all nature, over all men and nations.
What radical German critics could not fully achieve in their evolutionary assault on the religion of the Bible, German philosophers have more nearly accomplished. Their prejudices have often been borrowed and carried to still further extremes by enterprising, crusading Americans mounting an attack on the reality and claim of the Living God.
Almost everywhere in non-evangelical Protestant theology today, there links the destructive notion—so unstable a basis for faith, so highly serviceable to unbelief—that man can have no cognitive knowledge of transcendent Being, no rational knowledge of the supernatural world. For almost a century modern theology has built its “case for Christianity” on this highly vulnerable foundation. Time and again the superstructure has bent in the winds, and periodically it has even tumbled. But the architects of religious liberalism have simply erected new skyscrapers atop the crumbling ruins. It remained for the death-of-God theologians to find the courage to be consistent and, instead of trying to float religious principles in midair, to level them to the ground.
Behind this malformation of contemporary theology stands Immanuel Kant, who two centuries ago tried in a highly vulnerable way to salvage remnants of a supernaturalistic view from the supposedly scientific attacks of David Hume. A thoroughgoing empiricist, Hume virtually reduced reality to sense impressions and man to animality.
In his reply, The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant granted to Hume what neither Augustine nor Luther nor Calvin would have conceded, nor before them Moses, Isaiah, and Paul. In a costly surrender, Kant contended that all man’s knowledge comes from sense experience alone.
Ever since Kant’s influence affected modern theology, evangelical theologians have protested this needless relinquishment of cognitive knowledge of the spiritual world. They have emphasized that the God of the Bible is a rational God; that the divine Logos is central to the Godhead and is the agent in creation and redemption; that man was made in the divine image for intelligible communion with God; that God communicates his purposes and truths about himself in the biblical revelation; that the Holy Spirit uses truth as a means of persuasion and conviction; and that Christian experience includes not simply a surrender of the will but a rational assent to the truth of God. In brief, although fundamentalist theology was lampooned for half a century as anti-intellectual, nothing is clearer than the fact that in American Protestantism, only the evangelical movement energetically espoused the role of reason in religion.
The non-evangelical movements, meanwhile, increasingly minimized the place of reason in religious experience. Three times in the twentieth century the formative theology of Europe has collapsed, and in America the God-is-dead aberration now has emerged as its most widely publicized successor. There is an inner logical connection between these developments; namely, the inadequate reply of contemporary theology to Kantian criticism—or, seen from the other side, its failure to insist on rationality as a divine perfection, and on the intelligible character of divine revelation and of Christian experience.
The road from Ritschl’s modernism to the atheism of Altizer and Van Buren is not so circuitous as liberal Protestant seminaries imagine. One can get there swiftly by not allowing fancy rhetoric to detour him from attention to logical implications. A course in neo-orthodoxy or in existentialism may provide a long vacation on the way, but only an act of will—and surely not any logical necessity—requires such a delay.
A theological road map of the main route shows something like this: (1) Kant’s philosophy excluded rational knowledge of God, grounded the case for theism in man’s moral nature, and surrendered universally valid religious truth. (2) Ritschlian theology surrendered God’s rational revelation, held that in contrast to scientific truth the truth of religion falls into the sphere of value judgments, and located the essence of Christian experience in man’s trust or surrender of will. (3) Although Barthian theology reaffirmed God’s special self-disclosure and the distinctiveness of Christianity as the only redemptive revelation, it espoused its own inadequate theory of religious knowledge: divine revelation is assertedly not communicated in objective historical events, concepts, and words, but consummated dialectically in individual response. (4) Existential theology extended this emphasis on personal encounter (as against rational, propositional revelation) by dismissing all historical props and logical supports for faith. Said Bultmann: The Bible gives us, not new truth about God, but new truth about ourselves. Spurning the miracles as myths, Bultmann contended that faith is existential and rests in the apostolically preached Christ rather than in the Jesus of history.
The obscurity of God has, in fact, been a necessary consequence of every recent theology that asserts the reality of God and also his non-objectivity and yet concedes that religious experience nowhere includes universally valid religious knowledge. While existentialist theologians correlate the “silence” of God with existential awareness of Divine presence, the most influential existentialist philosophers turn this emphasis on God’s “absence” in quite another direction. Heidegger both denies God’s “existence” and revives Nietzsche’s emphasis on the “death of God.” Sartre views the silence of “the Transcendent” as among life’s profoundest problems, while Jaspers reduces the search for God to essentially “a search after the self”—a quest for divine reality in the primal depths of our own being.
It is therefore quite understandable that (5) Paul Tillich, who likewise viewed faith as existential rather than as rational, considered all qualities ascribed to the Unconditioned as symbolic, and not as literally true. Thus Tillich inverted the central emphasis of both neo-orthodox and existential theology on God’s self-disclosure; personality lost its status as an inherent perfection of divinity and instead became a way of viewing the Unconditioned in relation to us. As against a supernatural deity independent of the cosmos, Tillich deliberately emphasized the Unconditioned ground of all being, a god of the depths; transcendence survived mainly as a notion of the limit or boundary.
Significantly, the God-is-dead school found encouragement in Tillich’s theology of the impersonal Unconditioned, so deliberately contrasted with the transcendent personal God of the Bible. A more profound symbolism than any Tillich himself postulated is the fact that his death came shortly after a conference in which Altizer singled him out as spiritual father of the secular theologians. A passage from a recent book by J. Rodman Williams serves to illuminate this ready transition of existential theories to the secular point of view: “Existentialism, philosophical and theological, atheistic and non-atheistic, non-Christian and Christian, is quite closely related to the obscurity of God. It matters not whether this be the ‘silence of God’ (Sartre), the ‘absence of God’ (Heidegger), the ‘concealment of God’ (Jaspers), the ‘non-being of God’ (Tillich), or the ‘hiddenness of God’ (Bultmann).… The obscurity of God might indeed be called ‘the Eclipse of God’ ” (Contemporary Existentialism and Christian Faith, Prentice-Hall, 1965, pp. 63f.).
The penalty now being extracted from Protestant ecumenism for its increasing suppression of evangelical theology is the dooming of its own religious alternatives to irrationalism, and the inevitable decline of those alternatives to the silent contemplation of the death of God.
In a series of swift strokes, we may summarize this tragic twentieth-century decline from historic Christian theism to current secular atheism:
Historic Christianity expounds objective rational theism; that is, it affirms God’s intelligible revelation and man’s created capacity to know the supernatural in valid propositions.
Post-Kantian liberalism teaches objective non-rational theism; here faith is no longer thought to include intellectual assent to divinely revealed truths but is viewed as personal trust and obedience.
Neo-orthodoxy (dialectical theology) proclaims nonobjective non-rational theism; here the radical transcendence of God is said to preclude objective rational revelation, and individual response replaces propositional disclosure.
Existentialism depicts non-objective, non-rational, non-miraculous theism; here miracles are downgraded to myth, and the supernatural survives merely in the attenuated form of elements of experience that transcend scientific inquiry.
Tillich’s “Unconditioned” signifies non-objective, non-rational, non-miraculous, non-supernatural, non-personal theism; here the supernatural yields to the ground of being, while personality and all other attributes are regarded as symbolic rather than as literal representations.
Death-of-God speculation then yields non-theism.
Who Said ‘God Is Dead’?
Mahatma Gandhi was once approached by an atheist with the request to organize and promote an anti-God society. Gandhi replied, “It amazes me to find an intelligent person who fights against something which he does not at all believe exists.”
That incident reminds me of one that happened in Germany. A pastor entered a tavern where a man, wishing to embarrass him, rose and suddenly called out quite loudly, “Es gibt keinen Gott” (“There is no God”). The pastor went to him, calmly laid his hand on his shoulder, and said, “Friend, what you have said is not at all new. The Bible said that more than 2,000 years ago.” The man replied, “I never knew that the Bible made such a statement.” The pastor informed him, ‘Psalm 14, verse 1, tells us, ‘The fool says in his heart, there is no God.’ But there is a great difference between that fool and you. He was quite modest and said it only in his heart; he didn’t go about yelling it out in taverns.”—THE REV. MARTIN P. DAVIS, German Ministry, Phillipus United Church of Christ, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Before examining the argument presented by the God-is-dead contenders, one might well ask what gives their views a semblance of credibility. Even in biblical times the temptation apparently arose to serve as God’s pallbearer; but the Psalmist’s statement, “The fool hath said in his heart, ‘There is no God,’ ” suggests not only that unbelief is high folly but also that the fool had enough discretion to keep his unfounded doubts to himself. As a theology, the death-of-God view is doubtless unworthy of serious consideration; for if God is really dead, theology (the science of God) has lost its object and becomes sheer nonsense. But what is it that now lends the semblance of credibility to this increasing doubt about the reality of the supernatural?
Who of us cannot give an answer? And surely the reply need not begin with science, for the real place to begin is with the problem of preoccupation with the things of this world.
We plunge into this preoccupation from our very childhood, even from the cradle. Every waking moment we seem driven to physical adjustment, but what necessity is ever laid upon us for spiritual decision?
My mother was Roman Catholic and my father Lutheran; in a sense, I was nurtured at the juncture of the Protestant Reformation. Yet we had no prayers at home, nor Bible reading, nor grace at table. There was chinch at Christmas and Easter, and we children were sent to an Episcopal Sunday school. There, just before my confirmation, the parish priest learned to his dismay that I had never been baptized; within a few days, accordingly, I was both baptized and confirmed. I still vaguely remember the priest’s words to the godparents: “Seeing then, dearly beloved, that this child is now regenerate, and an inheritor of the promises of God.…” But I was no more regenerate than a Sears Roebuck catalogue. And I was a stranger to God’s promises.
As a pagan newspaperman on Long Island in my twenties—editor of a suburban weekly, and stringer for New York dailies like the Times and the Herald-Tribune—f had “enough experience” (or “little enough”) of “Christianity” to consider God a candidate for the obituary page.
If what the God-is-dead faddists mean is merely that the Deity is widely ignored as irrelevant and even obscured in much of the churchianity of our times, then I am quite ready to join their picket line against this high outrage. But I do not believe that this is all they mean, nor that it is the most important factor for assessing their views. Yet we dare not allow the fact of this cultural irrelevance of the Living God to be lost on us.
What of the multitude of members who consider church attendance, even it only sporadic, as little more than a respectable cultural custom, and who shun active identification and evangelistic engagement?
What impression of spiritual priorities do representatives of our so-called Christian nations make upon the pagan world?
Do not most statesmen conduct their political dialogue in the United Nations with no consideration of the will of God in national affairs?
Do we not promote staggering scientific successes as if human destiny depended more upon space exploration than upon human regeneration?
Is not the pearl of great price, for which Jesus said a wise merchant would exchange all that he had, still the most neglected commodity in our free-enterprise market?
Are not many intellectuals on our campuses now weighting thought against belief in the supernatural?
How neglected must God be, to be culturally and academically dead?
And what about those of us who are recognized as symbols of Christian commitment? How does our personal identity reflect our profession of the reality of God? What difference does it make in me as a person that the range of human experience includes the possibility of a relationship with the Living God? How does this reality bear on the routines of life—on fidelity to conscience, on fidelity in work, on fidelity in love? What do we do and say and think that demonstrates the presence of God in our lives? What discernible difference does it make today that we know God lives, and that Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, is risen from the dead?
Let me answer for the many thousands who would jump to their feet at this point.
When I was first challenged to believe, to confess Christ personally as my Saviour, to yield my life to the Living God, I realized from the moment of conversion that the New Testament does not exaggerate the contrast between faith and unbelief by its analogies of life and death, of light and darkness, of hope and doom. To know God personally, to share the forgiveness of sins, to experience the energy of the Holy Spirit in one’s life, to enter into Christ’s victory over sin and death—can anything be compared to this spiritual breakthrough except the discovery of a whole new world overflowing with life and power and purity and joy? Those who know that the Living God spectacularly transforms human lives dare to pray that in our fast-fading century some dark-skinned African may rise as a modern Augustine, or that Mao Tse-Tung may yet become the Billy Graham of Asia.
True as it is in our day, as in Paul’s, that “not many wise, not many mighty, not many noble” give their earthbound hearts to Christ, yet the cloud of witnesses is diverse and innumerable.
Billy Graham recalls a day when, putting the promises of God to the test, he found a spiritual reality about which he could not remain silent. “To many who are perishing in their sins, it is foolishness; but to us who are saved the Gospel is the power of God,” says Graham. “After nineteen hundred years, the Gospel has lost none of its ancient power.”
Charles Malik, too, recalls his spiritual revolt and rescue in essentially New Testament terms: “I meant to kill him [Christ] but I did not succeed. He triumphed over my evil desire. He lives now and sits gloriously on the right hand of God. I am cleansed from my sins because he actually and completely died exactly as I meant him to, but through the power of God, he actually and completely rose from the dead on the third day.… I beg his forgiveness, and what overpowers me is that he forgives me.”
Nor will the secular theologians succeed in their attempt to kill God, their bold plan to make religion effective by deleting its supernatural elements. These professional pallbearers, hired by the Devil, who advocate God’s death ostensibly to make Christianity relevant to the modern man, are motivated by concerns quite apart from the weak power of supernatural realities over modern life. They actually insist on God’s necessary irrelevance and unreality. They attack the existence of a transcendent spiritual realm, repudiate supernaturally revealed truths and precepts, and administer last rites to the God of the Bible.
What grounds do they claim for their case? Science, they say. So, whereas Christianity was really the mother of Western science, these academicians, not content to tolerate her even as a disaffected mother-in-law, now aim to banish the religion of the Bible as a veritable outlaw.
Empirical science, we are told, precludes any knowledge of supernatural entities; therefore the Christian religion can survive in our time only by eliminating all supernatural and transempirical elements. In keeping with this conviction, secular theologians discard the metaphysical aspects of revealed religion and reduce the relevant subject matter of theology to what is historical, human, and ethical. According to Van Buren (who assures us that, after all, only this ingredient is essential), what remains of Christianity is the man Jesus—his life and death and availability for others, his values, and the contagion of his perspective. In a word, 1966-styled Christianity is Jesus’ example of agape (love).
The secular theologians rest their case on a series of highly vulnerable assumptions. They blunder, in fact, in six respects.
The first blunder is their veneration of empirico-scientific categories as the filter for screening the whole of reality. Whoever considers this methodology as all-inclusive is automatically trapped in nature.
The second blunder is their naive notion that agape (or the moral value distinctively associated with Jesus) is really discerned and validated by this empirico-scientific approach. No less ardently than the American God-slayers, the Communists appeal to science to support their dogmas; and they scorn any appeal to agape as needlessly impeding the realization of a state-stipulated ethic by swift and violent revolutionary means.
The third blunder of the secular theologians is their notion that contemporary science tells how the universe is objectively structured. While nineteenth-century science entertained that presumption, twentieth-century science is more modest and presumes to tell us only what works. Most scientists, happily, are more ready to revise their notions about nature than many theologians their strange dogmas about what scientific theory demands. When Bultmann, for example, proposes an up-to-date revision of biblical cosmology in the name of science, he quite forgets that contemporary science no longer stipulates the objective constitution of reality. Thus he perpetuates a discarded nineteenth-century scientific mood.
The fourth blunder of the secularists is their selective appeal only to those scientists who share their naturalistic bias. Yet hundreds of highly qualified scientists earnestly believe in the reality of the supernatural and in the relevance of revealed religion. The American Scientific Affiliation is composed of professional scientists who espouse biblical theism. In a recent essay, Dr. Vannevar Bush of Massachusetts Institute of Technology declares it a misconception “that scientists can establish a complete set of facts about the universe, all neatly proved, and that on this basis men can securely establish their personal philosophy, their personal religion.… Science never proves anything, in an absolute sense.… On the most vital questions, it does not even produce evidence” (“Science Pauses,” in Fortune Magazine, May, 1965). Dr. Bush goes on to warn against leaning on science “where it does not apply.”
The secularists’ fifth blunder is to believe that they can reject the Living God and yet retain the Jesus of the Gospels. For Jesus acknowledged Simon Peter’s confession of him as “the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16) and attributed this recognition to God’s special disclosure. If he was mistaken about God, why should Jesus be trusted about the good? Even Nietzsche sensed that the death-of-God requires the renunciation of Jesus Christ and called for a “transvaluation” of Christian values—that is, for an overthrow of the morality of agape and a return to the old pagan views.
The sixth blunder is a confusion of corpses. It is not God but man the sinner who is dead—“dead in trespasses and sins,” as the Bible says, and in need of supernatural rescue.
There would be less misunderstanding if “secularized Christianity” were openly paraded not as an authentic revision but as an alternative religion. For more than a century, the makers of modern theology have offered every new fashion with the sales pitch that only this scantier version was guaranteed to appeal to the modern consumer. These trim reductions have attracted no permanent patrons, however; they have merely excited the modern appetite for more abbreviated styles. The death-of-God proposal now represents the bare exhaustion of possibilities; modern man ends up with a lifeless mannequin.
When introducing each successive style as the intellectual requirement of the modern mind, the promoters of these supposed religious fashions of tomorrow have simply indulged in special pleading. Either modern man is of all men most fickle, and wholly unable to make up his mind, or he has not really demanded—as recent generations were assured in sequence—the Kantian philosophy, the Ritschlian theology, the dialectical theology, the existentialist theology, and now (as Altizer thinks) the death of God.
Evangelist Billy Graham has said that “modern atheism is as dated as last week’s weather,” while Bishop Gerald Kennedy reminds us that “apostolic evangelism is as fresh as tomorrow.” The choice before the modern world remains the Gospel of Christ or the fables of men. Man is made for God, and without God he is not wholly man; the godless myths hold promise only for the making of monsters. To accept the death-of-God view is to head into a dead end for hope, for purity, and for spiritual renewal in our time.
